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Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Find the answers to questions our clients ask most frequently.

Onboarding
Competitor Monitoring
Product Matching
Pricing/Repricing
Integrations
Advanced Technical Questions
Reports & Alerts

Onboarding (Getting started with Price2Spy)

All our potential clients have a free 30-day trial. During that time you’ll be able to test out our solutions and see if Price2Spy is the right tool for you. Both during the trial period and your subscription with us you will be assigned an account manager who will help you with setting up your account and with any questions you might have. It’s important to know that setting up your Price2Spy account doesn’t require any technical knowledge. Still, in case you face some difficulties, you can always check our Tutorials and reach out to your account manager if needed.

 

A very important step in your onboarding process is adding the products to your Price2spy account. We would need you to provide us with the list of the product URLs that you would like to include, and our team will proceed accordingly.

 

Find more information about account setup in the product matching section.

When registering for your free trial, there is no need to share credit card information. Once the free trial ends, you can select a price plan you would like to continue using. You can always consult your account manager to help you select an ideal plan according to your needs. We also have a special offer for 1-year upfront payments, so we invite you to check it with your account manager. All the information and price plan comparisons are displayed here. Please keep in mind that add-ons incur additional costs per month if included.

Competitor Monitoring

Price2Spy can monitor any eCommerce website or marketplace where products are displayed. Depending on your need, you can decide to monitor one competitor or a couple of hundred competitors. It is essential to know that Price2Spy price plans have been created based on the monitored number of URLs (a product URL is a unique product page on a monitored site. E.g. 3 different products in a webshop have 3 individual product URLs), not the number of competitors.

It is legal to track all publicly available information. Clearly, websites don’t want to be monitored and tend to ban all the automated traffic. To make the monitoring as difficult to detect as possible – it is done from any of our servers scattered around the world. When traffic is detected, we have techniques to avoid bans by rapidly changing server locations. However, some systems invest time and money in analyzing traffic over a long period and manage to ban most of the locations used by our servers. That is why we’ve developed stealth IP traffic which is practically impossible to distinguish from regular site traffic and impossible to ban because there’s a high risk of banning millions of other visitors.

It is up to you to define how frequently you need to monitor your competitors’ prices. Depending on your products, market situation, and competitors, you can decide to perform price monitoring up to 8 times per day.

Price2Spy monitors product prices and availability but also captures additional data, such as shipping cost, time and details, stock status, seller name, rating, number of reviews, and average review score, as well as custom product details, as long as the information is available on the website. Speaking of capturing, Price2Spy can capture screenshots for you anytime MAP policy is violated, which makes denying MAP policy violations impossible by your resellers.

In 2012, Price2Spy became a pioneer in the industry by developing techniques to enable our clients to monitor multiple product variations on the same page. When encountering such a case, Price2Spy treats each variation as a separate product by detecting that the product URL contains variations. Afterward, we prompt you to select the exact variation you aim to monitor. We call this technique URL parameters, and we have implemented it on thousands of monitored websites. 

Product Matching

Before starting price monitoring processes, the products must be matched between you and competitors, meaning to find a corresponding product on competitors’ sites and link it to yours within your Price2Spy account. As we tend to tailor all the processes according to our client’s needs and the industries they belong to, we offer three different types of product matching: automatch, manual matching, and hybrid matching.

Automatch is recommended if your business belongs to an industry using highly standardized product identifiers (UPCs, ASINs, EANs, or MPNs) and if you plan to monitor over 1000 products. Benefits are numerous in the sense that you can notice when your competitors add new products if you enable repeated execution automatch functionality. Also, as manual matching done by you is time-consuming, in case we do it for you gets expensive as the number of products increases, automatch is cost-effective and the way to go. Automatch is an add-on feature in your chosen price plan, and additional one-off setup costs would apply.

Manual product matching is suitable for businesses that have a large number of competitors’ websites to monitor and a small list of products. We would need a list of products and competitors to set up your Price2Spy account and take over product matching for you, which would save you time and allow matching in any language across industries.

Businesses should consider hybrid product matching if products can not be effectively matched by unique identifiers (no EANs, UPCs, MPNs, etc), and there is a need for manual matching as a continual process. Machine Learning (ML) algorithm goes through products from both your and competitor sites and suggests only meaningful matching candidates. However, it will be humans who will be doing the final check.

Pricing/Repricing

Yes. In Price2Spy, Repricing Rules are mini sets of conditions that you choose from in order to more closely define your Repricing Strategy. We have 3 types of rules you can choose from: Base, Filter, and Auxiliary rules. Base rules are required and represent a foundation of your Repricing Strategy. Filter rules help you narrow down products, competitors, and other market conditions based on which you want to set your prices. Auxiliary rules are rules that help you further hone your Repricing Strategy and define certain edge-case scenarios.

In Price2Spy, a Repricing Strategy is a set of Repricing Rules that work together to create an algorithm (or, in other words, a formula) for repricing your products.

 

Of course! You may have multiple Repricing Strategies. The only thing you need to do is to designate each Repricing Strategy’s priority, so they don’t clash with each other.

There are three scenarios here. First, if you want nothing to happen – nothing will happen. Price2Spy will not reprice any products. Second scenario is that the next Repricing Strategy in the priority list finds products viable for repricing and reprices them. Third scenario is that you use the ‘Bridge the gap’ Repricing Rule. This Repricing Rule allows you to define what happens in cases like these.

Yes. There are numerous pricing limits within our Repricing Rules you can choose from. For example, you may choose the ceiling or the lowest possible price, you may choose the start and end date of each Repricing Strategy, or you may choose to only implement price increases or price drops. There are many possibilities, which is why we advise you to explore and see for yourself what Repricing Strategies you can come up with.

Yes. Each Repricing Strategy can have a widget. Each widget will contain a brief overview of the repriced products and links to easily access the relevant information.

Yes. We keep logs of performed repricing actions. You will be able to see the previous price, the updated price, based on which Repricing Strategy was the new price set, markups, and more. You will be able to see this data for each product repricing has been performed on.

There are two ways in which repricing can be performed –  Indirect or Direct repricing. In the case of Indirect repricing, Price2Spy will prepare a CSV file with the products that need to be repriced (and provide the new prices) and upload it to the FTP location you have specified. On the other hand, Direct repricing is a more seamless process where you integrate your store with Price2Spy and we make the necessary price changes.

Integrations

No, not at all. There is no server, or software needed from your side. Price2Spy is an online service, and all you need to do is sign up and start using it. If you’re using one of the standard supported eCommerce platforms, you can easily integrate. In case your products are already in your Google feed, you can reuse them by linking your feed, by following the simple instructions.

Price2Spy offers 2 types of integration: API and via eCommerce platforms. While many other services have only customized export of a CSV file, Price2Spy can offer you a real API integration. Price2Spy API is a standard Web service. You can access it either by SOAP or via REST interface. This kind of integration also enables you to get Price2Spy data directly into your application and feed data from your software to Price2Spy. Besides API integration, Price2Spy offers integration with various eCommerce platforms. If you’re using one of the eCommerce platforms supported by Price2Spy, you can easily integrate your online store.

Advanced Technical Questions

Yes, Price2Spy can crawl and extract data from any website. Regardless of the website language, script, or location, Price2Spy is able to extract all the necessary data. Even the most complex websites that use bot protection can be bypassed. Website crawling can be performed as a one-off or repetitive service (in which case you decide the crawl frequency).

By default, Price2Spy can extract product price and product availability. However, our Premium users can also have Price2Spy capture some other information (like shipping cost, seller information, delivery time, etc.) for them. Price2Spy uses highly flexible and uniquely powerful technology, which can track not only plain HTML but also JavaScript, CSS, and Ajax. Depending on how this information is shown on competitor’s product pages, additional setup costs may apply.

Reports & Alerts

All the Price2Spy reports can be exported from your Price2Spy account anytime you decide or set to be sent automatically to your email daily with the ability to specify the exact time to receive automated reports selected in an Excel file.

Price2Spy notifies you once your competitors run out of stock of monitored products and when product price changes. Notifications depend on the monitoring frequency you set. Regarding price change notifications, you can choose between receiving automatic email as soon as a price change happens (or less frequently, showing all changes in the selected period). Otherwise, you can log in to your Price2Spy account for a more detailed overview of these price changes through the Pricing Dashboard or any pricing report using the filer ‘Show only products with price changes in last X days’.